Suzan-Lori Parks To Be Honored by New Dramatists

New Dramatists, a playwright center and new play development laboratory, has announced that Tony Award-nominated and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks will be honored with the organization’s 2023 Distinguished Achievement Award. 

The honor will be presented at the New Dramatists’ 71st annual Spring Luncheon tribute on May 30, as the event makes its return for the first time since 2019.

Parks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer in Drama, was most recently represented on Broadway with the 2022 revival of her Pultizer-winning Topdog/Underdog, which first bowed on Broadway in 2002. Her previous Main Stem credits also include the 2012 adaptation of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.

The luncheon will be co-chaired by Tony winner Kenny Leon, who directed the recent revival of Topdog/Underdog, and Tony winner George C. Wolfe, who directed the debut production of the play at the Public Theater in 2001 and the original Broadway mounting.

“Suzan-Lori Parks is a generation-defining playwright,” New Dramatists artistic director Emily Morse said in a statement. “With depth, vibrant poetry and truth, Suzan-Lori invites us into her singular theatrical worlds and spins our notions of American history with vivid and complex perspectives. She creates human events onstage that leave an indelible mark, and it’s a privilege to those who love the theater to witness and experience her sheer and continual brilliance.”

“I am equally thrilled and humbled to receive this honor from an organization whose dedicated work and mission I cherish so much,” Parks said in a statement. “Supporting writers and amplifying new voices is more important now than ever, and I am deeply grateful to the New Dramatists for this recognition.”